


and i shall not fail that rendezvous

by cloudsandpassingevents



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
Genre: Gen, no joke i started this two years ago and never got around to finishing, probably not gonna happen but, trying to turn over a new leaf here and finish some stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-29
Updated: 2015-03-29
Packaged: 2018-03-20 04:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3636906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudsandpassingevents/pseuds/cloudsandpassingevents
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Death and the barricades, from the first to the last.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and i shall not fail that rendezvous

I have never liked Paris.

It comes with the territory, I suppose. After all, when you tour Paris, you rarely go to the slums, the half-drowned alleyways and cracking, hidden garrets. But people rarely die in opera houses and nice restaurants (though I have had a few, over the years). So I rarely end up in those places.

I imagine Paris is enjoyable enough for most people when they're traveling there for pleasure. Vacations are much less relaxing when you have to work during them.

Then again, I don't exactly have vacation leave written into my job description. Death rarely takes a holiday, no matter how brief.

 

\---

 

You want to know about them. How they died.

It's only natural, isn't it? To want to know how I came for them, what form I took? People seem to like that. Myself, I've never understood. I won't bring them back, you understand.

I remember them all, though. Every one of them, patches of color flashing in and out over the centuries. I could tell you about them all, if you wanted.

Yes, I remember those boys. Nine squares of color in a tapestry of a century.

 

\---

 

1.

He knew.

Even before rushing out ahead of everyone else towards the barricade, even before he saw the other fall running to pull him back towards safety. Even before he stood at the wrong end of the street and saw the form his death would take, he knew.

That I was there, watching. It didn't seem to bother him. In fact, he was more serene for the fact. But he had always been different.

They placed him in the center of the street, bound hand and foot, and took aim over their makeshift barrier.

The guns blossomed, orange and gold poppies unfurling in an instant of thunder and flame.

I watched the bullets twirl towards him. Almost dancers. Ballerinas spinning their way towards a man's soul.

He never closed his eyes once.

 

*****A SUMMARY OF JEAN PROUVAIRE*****

He was a poet.

As such, he held a strange interest in me. Not to say he would have purposely tried to meet me. He wasn't that kind of poet.

But I held no fear for him.

 

His soul was waiting patiently for me when the bullets struck. I barely had to loosen it at all before it came free into my arms. His death was the golden-orange haze of his firing squad. But it was also the color of early-winter sunrises after too many drinks and not enough paper to contain the thoughts in his head, and of soft candlelight flickering off the walls of hidden back rooms. Flames that made you think of phoenixes, not infernos.

 

*****A NOTE ABOUT POETS, OR PERHAPS THIS POET IN PARTICULAR*****

Had you stopped the bullets in midair and asked him for a final request, he would not have asked for a longer life. He would not have asked for a fuller life.

Jean Prouvaire would have asked for a pen and a sheet of paper. After all, poems about near-death experiences are far too commonplace now. Rarely do you find accounts written after actual-death experiences.

And he was young. His hands still ached with words that had overflown his mind and trickled down to his fingers. He ached for more, to give more of himself to scribbled verses before he gave his life to the people.

Then again, they say that life isn't fair.

 

I carried away his soul that day, and I suppose it's possible I carried away his words, too.

But I have found an old woman in Cuba for whom the stars shone for as brightly as they had for him, and a young soldier in the trenches who talked about clouds and beauty even as bullets flew over his head. And of course, there was that young girl in Germany who found her own words, slowly. He would have smiled to see her.

So you see, I didn’t rob him of his words. Perhaps I scattered them, but someone managed to find them all the same.

 

\---

 

2.

It would not be incorrect to say that I knew him. We had met, in passing, though he had never been the one I was sent to find. There was always a degree or two of separation between us: a friend, a contact, an ally-turned-enemy to just obscure my view of him.

In retrospect, it was amazing that I had never noticed him. He had spent a large portion of his life throwing himself at me, albeit not on purpose. It was just a risk that came with the profession. And truthfully, he was the sort to harbor an unconscious wish to punch me in the face had I ever tried to take him.

Nonetheless, it's rude to ignore an invitation for so long.

He was the first up the barricade when the attack began. So, of course, he was first to notice when the other was dragged over the edge. Of course, he was the first to run after him. And of course, he ran straight into me.

 

*****A TECHNICALITY*****

Running into me does not kill you.

Running into a newly-sharpened bayonet, though, often will.

 

The sky was a garish blue when I hauled his soul over my shoulder, bright enough to burn a memory in your eyes and shadows in your soul. It suited him nicely. He'd have laughed to know that even the sky had decided to pay tribute to him.

His soul, contrary to my expectations, did not punch me in the face when I lifted him up.

It was only after I began walking away that he began to struggle.

Somewhere back there, there were the ones who had survived. There was one whose survival, even as I carried another away, hung in the balance. And before me was someone who would have killed to be back with them again. Just to make sure they were all alright. There was an immense longing for one last look, to check if they had escaped, if they had made it back over the barricade safely.

Yes, he would have killed for one last chance. He would have died.

Funny, how it all seems to work out in the end.

 

\---

 

3.

Had he not lifted the other soldier, I doubt I would have met him.

I was already there, waiting beside him as he began dragging the man back from the barricade into their makeshift hospital. He had thirty seconds, maybe a minute. After all, I was there for him.

The bayonet caught him between the shoulders. Metal stained with blood, three times over. And I had two souls to carry instead of one.

Perhaps that is how the story should end. Perhaps it would have been, had he not been carrying the other man. It was a kind thing, you see, in a time and a place where kindness did not matter. You might call it useless. Perhaps it was. It's not my place to say either way.

I will say this, though.

 

*****A SMALL ASIDE*****

He was a surgeon once.

He had seen little boys come in with punctured lungs from crushed ribs. Young women with knife wounds that extended from their necks to their hips. Patients during amputations gone wrong, their souls already halfway in my arms before he could lift a hand.

Yes, he had seen very many things. And–

Well. It's very simple.

Humans do not fall over dead after three bayonet thrusts. Bleeding out is an awfully protracted, drawn-out process. By all rights, he should have lived for at least a few minutes more. Maybe five, maybe ten.

He did not.  

 

I carried him away from the carnage in my arms, sleeping peacefully, even before his body struck the ground.

You seem surprised. Perhaps I was, too.

After all, no one expects Death to have a heart.

 

\---

 

4.

His fingers were painted with battle when I reached him.

He lay by a small opening in a window, a pistol hanging limply from his fingers. The tips of them were still stained with gunpowder and bits of the whitewash that covered the outside of the building.

He was the last I picked up on that floor. On his shoulder was the tiny square of sky that he had been firing into. It glowed a faded white, the color of old paper and dirty winter mornings, one bright square among all the dirt and rubble that surrounded him.

His soul sat up to meet me. I should have expected it to. He was, I suppose, rather well acquainted with me. Or at least I with him. It had been a while since I had last seen him.

 

*****A SHORT STORY*****

The sky had been the color of dripping wet pages, streams of dark ink slashing across the clouds. I was walking out of a factory, a mangled body behind me and an intact soul in my hands. Against the building, I saw a child.

He was huddled against the bricks, small under a thin layer of cloth and a hat that covered most of his face. I heard his breath rattling in his chest.

He looked up, and saw me.

With one hand, he pushed himself up against the wall, pulled the rags around his shoulder tighter around himself. “No,” he said to me, and a new light flashed in his eyes. “You won’t take me.” He took a step forwards. “You won’t.”

 

His soul was almost feathery, but it was heavy, heavy with conviction and heavy with love, pooled in his hands and lungs and tired, angry, endlessly hopeful eyes.

I kept him in my arms the whole time I collected souls that day.

 

\---

 

5 and 6.

I found them both near the remains of a carriage near the left side of the barricade. Just two more bodies.

The first time I had seen them was the night before. The man on watch sat against a stack of paving stones and looked over the wall. His left hand wrapped loosely around a rifle, and his right rested on the shoulder of a sleeping man.

He was sleeping soundly. Like the dead, if you will.

The other man sat quietly as I stepped over them and did my work. Occasionally, he shifted his grip on the gun. His other hand never left the other man's shoulder.

When I left, he was still sitting where I left him. The shadows from the torchlight almost, but not quite, hid the small smile on his face.

 

*****CONCERNING THE MAN*****

There were no reasons for him to smile.

And yet there was every reason for him.

I do not read minds. I cannot tell you what he was thinking. I cannot tell you if he was right or wrong.

All I am certain of is that the second time I saw him, I recognized him by the smile first.

 

I found both there that day. The other man, the sleeping man, lay with one hand pressed over the first man's stomach, the other clasped in his grip. They were small hands. Small and callused in the way of the compassionate and the steadfast, and they fit easily in the other man's hands like they belonged.

His soul slipped easily into my arms, gentle and unyielding and warm all at once.

The other man took another slow, deep breath, and clutched the hand tighter. He looked at me, and his face settled into the familiar lines of a smile.

"Hello, old joker," he murmured quietly.

 

*****A COMMON QUESTION*****

What happens to these souls?

Even I’m not sure. It's outside the realms of my job description, you see.

And there are some things that perhaps shouldn't be known.

What I do know is that whatever came next, they faced it together.

 

\---

 

7.

He was lying beside an outcropping of the barricade, bleeding from a wound in his chest. His death was caught between so many others, almost lost in the haze and confusion. I nearly missed him.

The sun cracked the clouds as I lifted him. Even the soot and gun smoke staining him couldn't mask the bright flash of yellow across my vision when I touched him, laid him across the souls I had already gathered. My arms ached with their inexorable weight.

I do not take vacations, or sick days, or even minor detours along my way. My work is endless and monotonous. I'm not saying that I want your pity, though. It's lasted me millennia and will last me millennia more.

I do not rest. But sometimes even I am weary.

 

*****A WORD ON SOUL COLLECTING*****

All souls weigh differently in my arms. Over the years, I've held them all, cottony and dragging and light and aching.

Here are the rules I have learned.

Old souls weigh more than young ones.

Children, individually, are nearly lighter than air, but carry more than two at once and they are heavier than the darkest overcast sky.

And invariably, bright eyes and playful minds weigh far, far more than the heaviest of hearts.

 

Even after I set him down, the memory of his weight left my arms heavy.

 

\---

 

8 and 9.

They were some of the last that I took, in the silence after. That's how it goes, isn't it? The middle of all things may get muddy and blurred, but you never forget where a thing begins and ends.

They were not the last, but they were an end.

When I arrived, the guns had just fired. Smoke still hung in the air, like ghosts stretched out too thinly somewhere they didn't belong.

 

*****SOMETHING ABOUT ME, FOR A CHANGE*****

I don't believe in ghosts. How can I, really?

There are far more things for the living to fear than the souls of the dead.

 

They were pinned against a wall, blood streaming and puddling on the floor beneath them. Rivers running out to sea. One lay in a crumpled heap by the wall, the other ramrod straight against it. I took the one on the ground, and then the one standing, into my arms.

 

*****ONE LAST NOTE*****

I am not reasonable. It's not my place to judge your soul, if there is even a time and place for that to happen. It doesn't matter to me whether you were worthy or unworthy of what anyone did to you. I am a messenger. Nothing more, and nothing less.

I am fair, though.

And there is no hierarchy in Death.

 

When I lifted them, one's hand still rested in the other's grasp. One last, linked point.

I left it there as I carried them out, under a spotless, endless blue sky.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from "I Have a Rendezvous with Death," by Alan Seeger.


End file.
